Not long before his departure as chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, I went to interview Richard Goldstone at his office in The Hague.
When I turned up early, his aides handed me a sheaf of files on the work of mass graves investigators in the Balkans. Once a grave had been identified, the documents informed me, pathologists arrived with long sticks which they pushed into the ground. Each time they would withdraw the stick, they would smell it. When it emerged from the wet earth with the terrible stench of decomoposition, they knew where to dig.
At which point, I was shown into the office of Mr Justice Goldstone. Yes, he was appalled at the crimes that had taken place in ex-Yugoslavia. Yes, he was frustrated by the failure of NATO to arrest indicted Serb war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Yes, as a Jew he was obviously aware of the relevance of the Holocaust to his own work. No, he had never suffered from anti-semitism, even in South Africa. No, none of his family had been victims of Hitler's slaughter. And what did he like most about The Hague? "They have a very good classical music channel on FM," he said. "I listen to it all the time."
I had asked for four pages in our newspaper for my interview. Within an hour, I realised it would fill only half a page. Goldstone was so nice, so good - in the most literal sense of the word - so humane, that he simply wasn't worth four pages. Here was a real, decent man with much to do and little to say. So I wasn't surprised at the few pages in his tiny book.
Alas, they are also a collection of lectures he gave at Yale two years ago, pasted together with a computer which - and this is the second book running I've reviewed for The Irish Times with this flaw - takes no account of the reader. Instead of writing his memories afresh, Goldstone has pushed his computer disc at the publisher and, sure enough, the chronology is lost. He tells us of South Africa's transition to democracy, announces that we will hear about the United Nations Criminal Tribunals - and then goes back to South Africa in 1991.
The South African Goldstone Commission was a brave venture and Goldstone was - and is - a brave man. Despite threats and intimidation, he and his team of investigators proved that South African security forces were responsible for numerous acts of murder and brutality during the apartheid years. His contention that there could be no reconciliation without the recognition of a victim's suffering lies behind his life's work. And who can deny his belief?
There are times when his own narrative touches both the unbearable and the epic. At one independent "truth commission" seminar, Goldstone listened to Albie Sachs describing how a bomb placed by South African agents under his car in Mozambique had blown away an arm and one of his eyes. Then Mrs Gcina, the widow of a lawyer murdered by police agents, told how her 12-year old son had asked when his father would be coming home. "Her composure dissolved and she began to weep," writes Goldstone. "No one who was present will forget the scene of Albie Sachs attempting to console Mrs Gcina with the stump of his right arm."
When he was offered the job of chief prosecutor at The Hague, Golstone was asked by Edward Heath: "Why did you accept such a ridiculous job?" Heath added: "If people wished to murder one another, as long as they did not do so in his country, it was not his concern." Many western politicians, Goldstone was to conclude later, shared Heath's view.
I'm still a little wary of Goldstone's views on Yugoslavia. He tells us about the region's "historical hate" - the same mantra peddled by British foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind when he was trying to avoid armed intervention - and recounts the conflicting views of regional history put about by Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. But the history of Bosnia has not been one of continuous violence - except when outside powers were involved - and at least one of those conflicting historical accounts (that of the Bosnians) made more sense than the rest.
Goldstone inevitably clashed with the Americans - who gutlessly allowed their military to dissuade them from arresting Karadzic and Mladic for fear of reprisals - and with the vain and supercilious Boutros Boutros Ghali, secretary general of the United Nations. "I was astounded when he (Boutros Ghali) told me that if I needed to speak to political leaders, I should request them to come and see me. He said that was his practice!" Boutros Ghali, who believed that a chief prosecutor should spend all his time in his office - rather than gallivanting around the Balkans - had even demanded to see the receipts for Goldstone's expenses.
In 1996, Boutros Ghali objected to the issuing of arrest warrents against Karadzic and Mladic, the two most prominent Serb war criminals, while the Balkan war was still continuing - it might have messed up UN work. The UN secretary general need not have bothered; the Americans were not going to touch them.
"I deeply regret," Goldstone writes, "that the political leaders of the United States were not prepared to go against the will of their military leadership. The history of post-Dayton Bosnia could have been very different if Karadzic and Mladic had been brought to trial in The Hague. There is the likelihood that solid evidence would have emerged of the role played by Milosevic and his government in the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. And, conceivably, the subsequent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999 might have been avoided."
Conceivably. But, as Goldstone concedes, "making war is not a war crime" and international justice is heir to many ironies.
While Goldstone's team were sentencing the most ferocious of the Rwandan war criminals to life imprisonment in 1998, the little fish - the lesser criminals tried by the Rwandan government - were being ruthlessly executed. If you are going to commit genocide, it seems, it's safer to be the boss.
There's a certain innocence about all just men - even those who are arrogant enough to entitle their book: "For Humanity" - but I was a bit taken aback by Goldstone's smug assertion that the work of the tribunals may have influenced the Croatian army to exhort its troops "to protect civilians" in the Krajina in 1996.
Having witnessed the results of that exhortation - 80-year-old Serb women with their brains blown out, whole villages put to the torch by drunken Croat soldiers - I have my doubts.
So, too, when Goldstone reflects that "the international community is no longer prepared to allow serious war crimes to be committed without the threat of retribution". I wonder if that includes our war crimes; the deliberate destruction of civilian targets by NATO, for example, as well as the wicked atrocities of Milosevic's paramilitaries, the murderous sanctions which have cost half a million children's lives in Iraq, as well as the crimes of Saddam. Again, I have my doubts.
Robert Fisk is Middle East Correspondent of the London Independent, based in Beirut since 1976, and has also covered the Balkan wars since 1992